If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

04-20-2012, 08:20 AM

Phoronix: AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

In what will certainly be controversial and disappointing to some Radeon Linux desktop users, AMD will soon announce that they will effectively be discontinuing support for several Radeon product families from their proprietary Catalyst driver. After that point, for future Linux distribution updates, the open-source Radeon Linux driver will be your only option for accelerated graphics. This is likely happening with the Windows Catalyst driver too, but at least there they have a better-maintained legacy driver process.

Comment

I expected that for DX10 hardware, just did not know when it would happen. AMD tends to drop support for hardware that did never 100% work. It is fairly simple to replace PCI-E cards but laptop users will absolutely love AMD for this move. Also you can forget every onboard solution for AM3+, as series 8 chipsets only have got HD 42xx and series 9 chipsets have got no IGP at all. Of course you don't want a faster Phenom or FX CPU together with fglrx, don't you? The 3d performance was not good anyway for IGP but some simple games worked better than using oss and some ppl maybe used xvba (even if it was limited). xvba was "officially" supported for series hd 4. So if you want to have got a cpu which are faster than those you get for FM1 you can only buy Intel, nice marketing aspect. At least you can use vaapi with Intel. You can understand that move because AMD really needs to save money as they lost 590 mio $ only in q1/12. They should at least sell some fast cpus, faster than the current fx joke cpus made for gamers...

Comment

Ok AMD just try to do that and you will never see one more $ from me and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I bought a new laptop just one year ago with a radeon card on it (a lenovo thinkpad edge 15 for the reference, the series with the nehalem processor). You cannot just drop the support for it so quickly. And don't even try to say "use the open source radeon driver", it just half works and i didn't paid the laptop half the price .

Comment

I dumped fglrx ages ago and not regretted it. Ordinary Open Source users simply aren't its target audience. The driver was always behind new kernels and X servers, bugs remained unfixed, no-one was interested in receiving bug reports and its stability/usability fluctuated wildly from month to month anyway.

The Open Source drivers may not have all the benchmark performance, but in my experience they have a stability and consistency that fglrx could never achieve in its darkest dreams.